A few weeks ago, in release notes for Downie v4.1.16, I’ve announced the end of support for RTMP streaming in Downie v4.2. This has raised some questions that I’d like to answer in this blog post.

TLDR; you’re fine, you don’t need to worry.

What is RTMP streaming?

RTMP streaming is a type of streaming that was used by many sites 5+ years ago and requires Flash Player for it to work. Please do not confuse it with HLS or DASH streams which are very common now and are supported by the open HTML5 standard.

If you are in for more details, see the Wikipedia article.

Why is it being removed?

The short answer is because it’s time to move on. Longer answer is:

• RTMP streaming is no longer used by any sites that Downie supports. All supported sites have moved to modern technology by now.
• RTMP streaming was never supported in the User-Guided Extraction and commonly required various extra parameters, making it rarely work for unsupported sites anyway.
• This feature is supported by some very old pieces of code that would need to get migrated to M1 processors – and it’s not that I’d be lazy.

Will I miss it?

I doubt it. During the month of it being deprecated, if you encounter RTMP download, you’d be getting a warning similar to the one on this screenshot. If you are not getting this warning, you are not using RTMP streaming. As mentioned above, RTMP streaming requires Adobe Flash Player in order to work, which is no longer supported and most browsers actually block it and uinstall it. RTMP streaming can still be found on sites that are really old and haven’t been updated in years.